Well, good morning, my name is Kasten Hudgens, I am a critical care nurse and clinical assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and I am also the outgoing chair of the simulation and education subcommittee. I have no disclosures, and any mentioned products, companies, or images are purely arbitrarily. Now my objectives are to present new evidence for improving patient care and clinical education, and also to demonstrate the efficacy through the use of simulation and virtual reality, with a focus on the impact of POCUS and also VR customization. Now POCUS, again in short for point of care ultrasound, has greatly expanded its use multiprofessionally and globally. As we can see here that in the past 10 years, point of care ultrasound has been used to aid in the assessment of critically ill patients, and educational committees worldwide are classifying POCUS as mandatory, and they are adopting it into their medical curricula. Also we see that from clinics to first responders, and to multimodal use at the bedside, POCUS has become highly predominant, and it is now, as I already said, considered mandatory and included in the curricula. Now the practice improvement of POCUS training is the use of simulation and virtual reality. We are all aware of the many applications of ultrasound, but now instead of traditional training initially only reserved for special groups, we can now apply the technology of simulation to expand and improve training for many users. As an adjunct traditional teaching, as well as for distance and asynchronous teaching, we've been using it in all modalities from low to medium and high fidelity. Now simulation can facilitate the distance and the asynchronous teaching, and as we see here it is always, of course, dependent on your needs, but highly customizable and always depending on the budget as well, but certainly anyone can benefit from ultrasound training, and you have a wide range of which modality that you can use, again, whether it's low fidelity with still images, medium fidelity with iPads, or the high fidelity where you can achieve the maximum realism and optimal views. And then, of course, having your training simulators on hand as well. Now what is most remarkable, and of course I'm partial because I'm a critical care nurse, is the use of POCUS by nurses, and we know that POCUS is useful in everything from vascular access, bladder evaluation, nasogastric tube placement, to fluid status evaluation and lung assessment, just to mention a few. Now most state boards of nursing consider POCUS to be within the scope of practice for nurses, and thus many healthcare organizations facilitate training and encourage nurses to learn in the use of POCUS to minimize patient length of stay, and it also frees the physicians to focus on other tasks at hand. And it has definitely improved the evaluation of vascular access and placement. Now peripherally inserted catheter placement and hemodialysis fistula cannulations, which are always prone to CLABSI, have greatly decreased with the use of ultrasound, and of course also then has led to an overall decrease in procedure costs. Now the benefit as well is that patients have benefited in remote areas where there is minimal access to physicians and hospitals. Now what else has demonstrated efficacy in simulation and education is the customization of virtual reality, and as seen here again with POCUS, which is on the forefront, but also for many other professional uses and training modalities. Here we see the in-house drive of curricular and the retention of VR ownership is enabling to easily update, extend, and modify virtual reality training, and using the customization of medical virtual reality for simulations. And we see this whether it is in medical schools, dental schools, schools of nursing, medical device companies, surgical training centers, or hospitals. Now with this ownership and the modification of VR scenarios, it definitely makes it an application as an essential feature for practice improvement in all settings. And as seen here, whether it is for assessment, for diagnosis, and also interdisciplinary. Now in summary, we can see how far we've come in the use of ultrasound since the 1950s, and the involvement and application of simulation and virtual reality to facilitate education, training, and most of all, to improve patient outcomes on a global level. Thank you.

point-of-care ultrasound

virtual reality

medical education

patient care

clinical training